Ramblings of a software engineer

Improving the user experience in Kiten, guest post

2011-09-04T10:48:00.004-06:00

Note: Today's guest post brought to you by Daniel Moctezuma.

Improving the user experience in Kiten

As part of Google Summer of Code 2011 I worked on improving Kiten in various aspects:

1. Write a better deinflection system

2. Add more filtering options

3. Update EDICT and KANJIDIC dictionaries

4. Write a Kanji Browser tool to help users learn kanji

5. Bugfixes and code polishing

Before going deep in each point, I would like to tell you what Kiten is (in case you haven't heard about it).

Kiten is a Japanese Reference Tool that consists mainly of a Dictionary and a Radical Selector, it uses the EDICT (for vocabulary) and KANJIDIC (for kanji) dictionaries.

The Dictionary lets you translate from japanese to english and from english to japanese, this means you can write in english, hiragana, katakana or kanji to search in the dictionaries.

The Radical Selector lets you to search for a kanji by filtering its radicals, this way you can find a kanji without knowing anything about its readings or meanings.

With this GSoC project, Kiten is now more than that.

1. Deinflection system

Kiten now has a better deinflection system that deconjugates a verb/adjective and gives you the result of it. Example: 笑った is the past tense form of 笑う (to laugh), but (like in any language) if you search a past tense verb in a dictionary you will not find it. So Kiten can deconjugate the input and search for it.

You might wonder, "but why is this necessary?", the truth is that some japanese language learners can be confused of some verb tenses, so they might not know the dictionary form of a verb. Kiten can help you with that and give you feedback about your input, so next time you will know if you entered a verb in past tense or so.

2. Add more filtering options

This improvement helps users to filter results that "start/end with" or "contain" what the user entered to be searched. Also it shows the results in a better order:

exact match
words starting with the user's input
words ending with the user's input
words containing (anywhere/in the middle) the user's input

It helps a lot to have order in what we see, most of the time the user wants to know the meaning for a exact match, but also it is good to know if a word is used different, as at the end of an expression or somehow in the middle.

3. Update EDICT and KANJIDIC dictionaries

For some years Kiten was not being maintained regarding dictionaries, now that has changed with this improvement. These dictionary files are the core of Kiten and having the latest updates of them is a must. As part of the project, the user is now able to update the dictionaries at any time (if an update is available).

4. Write a Kanji Browser tool to help users learn kanji

You can browse all the kanji available in the KANJIDIC dictionary and be able to search by Grade and Number Strokes. Just click on the kanji and you can access detailed information such as stroke order, onyomi/kunyomi readings, meanings, grade, etc.

This tool helps you to learn Kanji by Jouyou Grade, in other words, KanjiBrowser can filter kanji by grade difficulty so you will only see those in the current grade you are interested in learning.

5. Bugfixes and code polishing

This includes various areas of Kiten like libkiten maintenance, bugs in the dictionary, etc.

Just to name a few:

You can add more dictionaries (EDICT/KANJIDIC format), as well as having deinflection system compatibility with them.
Libkiten can be considered mature now.
Fixed memory leaks.
Code simplification (for better performance and readability).
Clear separation between common/uncommon entries.
and more.

So, now we can say Kiten is not only a Japanese Reference Tool, but a Set of Tools:

Dictionary (Japanese <---> English)
Radical Selector
Kanji Browser

Also I am proud to say this contribution is now merged on the master branch and expected to be released in KDE 4.8 along with other contributions from the KDE community.

Finally I would like to thank the following people:

Jeremy Whiting, for being my mentor in this project.
Anne-Marie Mahfouf, for her support since the beginning.
Joseph Kerian (previous Kiten developer/maintainer), for his support on some questions I had about the code base.
KDE, for choosing my proposal and for letting me have this amazing experience.
Google, for Free Software Development promotion by paying to students and encouraging them to learn and contribute to our world.

Thanks a lot!

Daniel E. Moctezuma

Kontact with google calendar

2011-04-22T16:24:00.010-06:00

Hey all, with the help of some friendly folks in #kontact I was able to get mail/calendar set up and working in kontact today. I previously had some bad settings in akonadi from my last attempt a few months (maybe a year?) back. and clearing .config/akonadi helped alleviate that problem.

Since I've been using an android phone lately much of my calendar and mail stuff is on google services, so naturally I wanted to sync my calendar, contacts, and mail with google. Fortunately this is all possible, unfortunately it's not all that clear how to set it up. So here's a quick walkthrough for future reference.

Lets look at the tricky one, calendars. To add a google calendar to your korganizer you just need the caldav address which you can get from the calendar's settings like this.

Then you'll need the google calendar url to plug your calendar's address into which can be found in the help section, here for convenience:

Then you can open korganizer (or kontact) and right click the calendar manager and choose Add Calendar. It will give you a list of resources like this:

Since google calendars support CalDav choose the Dav groupware resource. Here's where the ui could use some update and/or simplification. The next thing you will see is a list of calendar providers, of which google is not a part like this:

The trick (thanks Leo) here is to click cancel since google is not on the list. Strangely (most cancel buttons close instead of continuing) this continues to a dialog to let you add your calendar by url that looks like this:

You can finally put in your url (combine the google calendar url with your calendar's address) and enter your username (foo@gmail.com) and hit the fetch button. After entering your username again (not sure why it doesn't take the one you already set) and password you are able to choose your calendar and add it to korganizer.

Anyone that votes we simplify this process raise your hand :) o/

School's out

2011-04-03T20:03:00.001-06:00

KDE-Edu is out of subversion and now in git. Take a look. And not a moment too soon. This coming week there will be a KDE Edu sprint in Bilbao Spain. What better place to learn how to use git than a sprint with peers eh? Anyway this message is brought to you by the hard work of Ian Monroe and Nicolas Alvarez who worked very hard to get the conversion rules set up. (And fixed a few bugs in svn2git in the process).

Minor tasks

2011-03-29T20:41:00.005-06:00

Just a quick note to let you all know what I've been up to this week. Monday I took a look at what will be needed to finally fix Jovie (make it use the voices you add, etc.) The rest of the week I've spent some time setting up a local copy of accessibility.kde.org to play with. Last night I got it working with chihuahua layout which looks nice, but has some accessibility issues. I let the awesome crew in #kde-www know about them and a fix is in the works. I wont switch the site over to the new layout until it's accessible, don't worry. I would like to clean up the content on there though, it's very outdated, and much of it could probably move to techbase and/or community.kde.org.

Oh, I've also signed up to be a SoC mentor. This summer is going to be awesome.

QtZeitgeist 0.7.0 released!

2011-03-28T15:04:00.001-06:00

Today we released version 0.7.0 of libqzeitgeist aka QtZeitgeist (the first release with a tarball) It's basically the same as 0.1.0 but with a new version, some minor fixes, and a license file.

libQZeitgeist is a wrapper library around the Zeitgeist DBus API for Qt, and is brought to you by Collabora in cooperation with the Zeitgeist team and KDE.

If you don't know what Zeitgeist is:
Zeitgeist is a service which logs the user's activities and notifications, anywhere from files opened to websites visited and conversations, and makes this information readily available for other applications to use. It is also able to establish relationships between items based on similarity and usage patterns.

To get started:

* Get the code http://releases.zeitgeist-project.com/qzeitgeist/
* Get the Zeitgeist code from http://launchpad.net/zeitgeist/0.7/0.7/+download/zeitgeist-0.7.tar.gz
* Join #zeitgeist on irc.freenode.net
* Have fun with use developing
* Follow the work on http://gitorious.org/kde-zeitgeist/libqzeitgeist

It's alive!

2011-03-01T20:35:00.005-07:00

I'm very excited to announce that qt-atspi has seen some major progress lately. Frederik Gladhorn has been kicking some major butt and has gotten it into much better shape than it has been previously. I just tested his "experimental" branch, and I've got to say wow. Since I started testing and playing with qt-atspi my holy grail has been to try to get our qt calculator to work with orca as well as gcalctool does. Today I need to get a new holy grail. Fired up orca, fired up the calculator test app and was delighted to hear every button, every change, selection, activation all spoken to my ears through the chain from QAccessible to qt-atspi to at-spi2 to orca to speech-dispatcher to espeak (Quite the chain, I know). In the next days and weeks we'll likely get qt-atspi packaged for distros to test and I'll definitely put some polish on the how to build it yourself tutorial I put on techbase last year for those that want to play with it sooner :)

Frederik you rock!

P.S. Sorry for no pretty pictures, maybe for my next post I'll learn how to make a videocast of qt-atspi in action :p

KDE Sysadmins rock!

2010-06-22T09:31:00.003-06:00

Hey all. I just wanted to take a quick moment to tell/remind you all that our (KDE) sysadmins rock! They have been very busy recently getting the move to git going. git.kde.org is running cgit, projects.kde.org is running Redmine, there's a web app setup to collect our ssh public keys for those of us who were using https. I spoke a bit with Eike Hein on irc today and he said "I don't think we've had an idle day this month really :-)" Sounds like the next step is setting up reviewboard. Amarok and Konversation are both migrated from gitorious.org to git.kde.org and will be used to test and setup the rest of the infrastructure we will want and need to do what we do best.

So fellow kde folk, please take a moment to thank these diligent guys and let them know how much you appreciate all they have done and continue to do for us all.

Renaming kttsd

2010-05-31T07:22:00.002-06:00

Hey all, I thought I already blogged about this topic, but found I didn't. Anyway, one of the things I wanted to get done while in Randa was to rename KTTSD (Kde Text To Speech Daemon) to something with a meaning that is pronounceable. It's changed a lot since 4.0 (and 3.5, etc.) so a new name fits. A user suggested the name Kitty on a previous blog post, so I used that for about a day until another developer pointed out that Kitty exists (http://www.kesiev.com/kittyguide/home/) though it seems outdated/unmaintained. The next morning in Randa, we had a brainstorm session with other developers and came up with a few choices. We went with Jovie which happens to be a less commonly known and used name (and is also one of my daugther's name). So new in kde 4.5 Jovie will talk to everyone (if you or your distro setup speech-dispatcher correctly, etc. etc.)

Next step? Move the developer page from accessibility.kde.org about kttsd that's outdated to techbase and update it for D-Bus, 4.x documentation.

Multimedia/Edu Sprint day -1

2010-05-24T09:27:00.005-06:00

I can't remember which day it is today besides that it's Monday. Tomorrow morning very early I'll hop on a train with Percy from Peru and George and go to Zurich, then fly home in our different directions from there. I believe a lot was done in this sprint. I have a longer todo list than I did before, that's for sure. I'll also be blogging more hopefully about the things I do going forward.

One thing I did last week but didn't blog about was to move the workspace tab from the application style area of system-settings down into desktop style area instead. I as many others I've heard were confused when we opened the desktop theme details settings and couldn't set the global plasma theme from in there. I combined that one with the existing workspace tab of the other kcm and call the combination desktop style. I hope this will be more usable and discoverable.

Multimedia sprint

2010-05-20T14:01:00.003-06:00

Today lots of people arrived for the first day of the Multimedia/Edu sprint including myself. 2 hours drive to Las Vegas, 4 hour flight to DC, 7.5 hour flight to Zurich, then another 3 on the train. I would have slept on the plane, but there were crying babies (and I was excited to get here). Mario is a great host and has all our needs taken care of, it's great to be here. I've met a few developers I've only known on irc so far, so it's been good though I am tired.

On one flight I did make a todo list of stuff I'd like to get done while here so will start to work away at that now. The plan so far is tomorrow to get all together and decide what we each want to do (and do the same each morning I believe). Anyway, enough for now, just wanted to get my 2 cents in about the day 1 :)

Headed to Randa, Switzerland

2010-05-19T08:04:00.004-06:00

Hey all. It's been a while. Lots of good things are happening in KDE land these days. I wish I were helping with more of them but will be this week anyway. I'm waiting for a flight to Zurich right now then will hop a train to Randa where the Multimedia/Edu sprint will take place. Thanks to my sponsor and employer Collabora Ltd.

What do I hope to achieve while there? I will definitely be helping with whatever needs help in Edu land. I will also be presenting and discussing any possible tie ins between Edu and accessibility. Plane boarding soon will report more soon.

The state of free accessibility

2010-02-08T05:27:00.003-07:00

Hello all. As some of you may have read at osswatch, or in Jeanie's open letter to Oracle, or even from mark doffman of codethink (or experienced yourself in some cases) the state of free accessibility technology is somewhat lacking as of late. I've spent some time investigating the various players, testing solutions, discovering what's out there, etc. and would like to give an account of how things are from my perspective as a KDE developer and as one who would like to see desktop accessibility on Linux and our other platforms flourish.

First maybe an introduction of the key pieces of this puzzle would help.

The first piece of the puzzle from a KDE developer's perspective is Qt's Accessibility classes here. As part of QtGui module most (maybe all) Qt widgets are accessible as far as they can be. They all provide description, state, role, and actions in Qt's way that allows them to be "seen" via accessibility on Windows, should allow them to be "seen" on linux/unix via at-spi2 (will discuss this piece a bit later) and allows them to be "seen" with carbon builds on Mac also (accessibility for cocoa is a feature request that has not been scheduled at the moment). So as far as gui developers are concerned, as long as existing Qt gui widgets (or derivatives) are used, we should be in good shape. Unfortunately, the next piece falls a bit short.

The next piece of the puzzle is the qt-atspi2 bridge. This is in the works and can be found here. This takes the form of a qt plugin backend for qaccessible. It bridges the gap between qaccessible classes and at-spi2 dbus interface. Though Mark Doffman at codethink has done amazing work here. The latest version is not quite ready to work with at-spi2 because of recent changes in at-spi2 itself.

The final piece of the puzzle for kde/Qt apps is at-spi2 itself. This has been developed quite a bit by various members of the gnome-accessibility community. I know Mark Doffman spent some time optimizing some things and fixing issues in there. Gnome is going to be switching from corba to this new dbus-based at-spi2 for gnome 3.0 (and possibly sooner, depending), so desktop accessibility will at last be unified on linux platforms. Unfortunately for Qt apps, the api recently changed quite a bit in january of this year, so the qt-atspi2 bridge needs to be updated to work with these changes. I have a description from Mark of what needs doing, but need to wrap my head around it before being able to help with the effort here, come join irc.gnome.org #a11y if you'd like to lend a hand. This really probably needs to become a community effort in the long run.

As can be seen above there is lots to do to make kde accessible, lots to do to make linux desktop accessible and lots to do to make sure everything is in place for everything to work nicely. So... come join the effort! join #kde-accessibility (I was often alone in there until recently Luke Yelavich of speech-dispatcher fame joined). join irc.gnome.org #a11y. get on some mailinglists, come to akademy (I hope to have a talk there, we'll see).

Kttsd 0.5.0

2010-02-03T20:13:00.004-07:00

Ktts is finally getting a version bump since 4.0. What can you expect in this release (that will come out with KDE SC 4.4 as part of kde-accessibility)? Well, a lot of things have changed, but more is still a work in progress. The most significant change is that ktts now talks directly to speech-dispatcher, which is a daemon that handles all speech from kde, gnome, console, etc. Speech-dispatcher itself supports many synthesizers like espeak, festival and so on. The plan was to make ktts expose all of the capabilities of speech-dispatcher, but it didn't quite get to that point yet.

The first new thing you should note is that if speech-dispatcher is set up, ktts doesn't need any voices configured at all. speech-dispatcher uses whichever synthesizer it can find and plays a dummy wav file if it can't find any. (The talkers tab in kttsmgr doesn't really affect anything inside speech-dispatcher yet anyway...) You can play with the different voices from the jobs tab though, setting different pitch, volume and speed, hitting apply, then clicking speak clipboard contents (I'll add a test button for 4.5, or possibly 4.4.1 if the translators let me).

One thing that didn't make it in to this release was the gui for setting up speech-dispatcher. It has a command-line configuration tool called spd-conf which works fine. But I would like to get a gui for it in the next release if time permits.

I'd also like to join kttsd and kttsmgr into one process/app, kttsd doesn't do job management anymore because speech-dispatcher does all that now (yes I know the jobs tab will be renamed at some point, since it doesn't deal with jobs at all). So joining kttsmgr and kttsd makes sense I believe. Alternatively making speech-dispatcher have its own dbus access would remove the need for kttsd completely, kttsmgr could then just be a gui for configuring and controlling speech-dispatcher itself. We'll see which direction things go as this progresses.

Anyway, junt wanted to give a short update. Enjoy the wonder that KDE SC 4.4 will bring =)

svn2git rules!

2010-01-23T07:45:00.002-07:00

In case anyone has been hiding under a rock lately, yes kde is moving to git in the foreseeable future. There is a meeting weekly in #kde-git about the migration progress, what needs doing still, and what is done. One task that had not been taken on very much is writing the rules to import from svn into git (using svn2git, which is a handy app thiago wrote a while ago).

As one of the few people working on kde-accessibility these days, I took it upon myself to check those rules. This was a bit harder than I imagined it would be, and harder than it should be due to lack of documentation (or possibly my lack of reading the existing documentation?) and some nuances of the rule syntax and kde's svn history itself. Just thismorning I finished this and want to share some things I learned here for others doing the same for other modules.

#1 match lines should end with a / in most cases.
if you are matching a path in svn, you have to remember to add the trailing / or you will get cryptic svn errors about being unable to get data of a non-object or somesuch. Thanks to argonel for pointing this out to me the other day.

#2 action recurse rules are tricky but necessary.
I first copied konversation's rules to start kdeaccessibility's ruleset, then merged in kdeaccessibility parts of kde-rules-main. There was a problem though, svn2git would get stuck when it got to creating the 4.0.0 tag, because the 4.0 branch didn't exist. Then I noticed a rule I had missed from kde-rules-main

match /(branches|tags)/KDE/([^/])/
action recurse
end match

after adding that though, the import would fail even earlier than before, because the above match would match files as well as folders, so entries with /branches/KDE/4.0/README which cannot recurse (because it's not a folder...)
The answer was to make the recurse match only what it needed to, so to create the 4.0 branch I set it to match /branches/KDE/4.0/ with a min-revision and max-revision of when /branches/KDE/4.0/ was created.

Problem with that match is that it didn't match 4.1 or others, since the match is a regex this was easy to fix, just make the match terminate with $ so it only matched svn revisions that are folders 4.0, 4.1, etc. etc.

I'll start looking into another module's rules next, so we can get this migration to git done. Any opinion which module I should look into next (kdeaccessibility was a good choice as its apps never spent time in kdereview or playground...)

Utah Open Source Conference 2009 day one

2009-10-08T21:21:00.003-06:00

Today was the first day. Setup went fairly smoothly. I set up wired network with the switch and two boxes Ian Geiser sent me to use, but the wired network was not working (I later connected their wired network just into one machine and it worked fine, so dunno). Luckily they had wireless in those little boxen, so that got them online to demo kde 4.3 kubuntu. I realized how important web access is to kde during that time though, the microblogging, comic, weather, etc. applets all need web access obviously. But so did ghns to get providers of comics for the plasmoid, etc. etc. I think I take web access for granted most of the time.

There was some good feedback at the conference. I heard lots of people saying they used to love kde but haven't used it since 4.0 came out. I left all those people with hope in 4.3 that they hadn't tried besides there on the demo boxen. I met a few kde fans which was pretty cool. Showed amarok, kde-edu apps (kstars, kig, kgeography, klettres to some guys that mentioned they had kids), kmahjongg, and plasma of course. I also showed kwin present windows and it's ability to filter by typing, so many people don't know about that useful feature! I can definitely see where promotion can get us many many more users testing, using, playing with and enjoying the wonderful stuff we contribute our efforts to. Tomorrow should be fun, will give more report tomorrow probably.

I think the only downer about the day was that there was a huge window right behind our row of tables, which gave so much glare the screens were barely visible. That and irc was blocked, hehe.

ghns meeting

2009-10-04T18:25:00.003-06:00

Yesterday morning we had another meeting in #ghns on freenode. It went very well, there was a much better turn out than last week, and since we had been hacking on things this week a lot more thought was brought into it I think. The plan on techbase got some ui features added to it based on feedback from users, and some developers. Josef was at the meeting and will be adding some things to HotStuff (the implementation of dxs running on newstuff.kde.org) to support paging which will be good. Especially since Eugene and some others thought of a way to do paging that's transparent to the user. We'll load two pages of data, show it in the list, and when the user scrolls to the second page of data, we'll load the third page and so on. Hope that will turn out feeling natural and cool =) We've also decided to leave the filter box in for local filtering (but rename it to Filter) and make server-side search available via a search button. Some complaints about the current method of "sorting" were raised also, since it doesn't really sort anything, just grabs 3 different feeds from the server (highest rated, latest, and most downloads). I'm thinking of making those tabs, but that's not optimal either. If anyone has a good idea how to represent that with the ui we have, that would be cool. Anyway, all in all it was a great meeting, and though there's lots more to do, we are all optimistic.

Hopefully in the next couple days I'll have some real stuff to show, so stay tuned.

KNewStuff3

2009-09-30T21:12:00.003-06:00

In the past couple days I've been playing with the code, and have reached a couple conclusions. First, KNS::Engine isn't an engine, it's an interface the apps use to interact with the engine. Apps don't need to know anything about the engine though (and currently don't/can't anyway). Also this interface class has no signaling mechanism, so it would be good to derive it from QObject so it can send out signals and apps can connect to them. In other words some binary incompatible changes will be necessary and I'm on the way to make them happen by creating knewstuff3. Because of this decision we have the chance to make some binary incompatible changes in the library itself which I believe will help keep the design cleaner and make it easier to maintain as a whole.

I had a discussion on irc today about what to name the interface class, and after a few suggestions settled on the name KNS::Client. I'll be getting that going this week, and hope to have something basic working by next week. We'll see.

This coming saturday we'll have another meeting on #ghns on freenode if anyone else wants to come along and share their 2c with the rest of us. As I blogged last time, last weekends meeting was productive. We've got a plan and are on the road to better things.

KNewStuff2 Future

2009-09-26T09:16:00.003-06:00

Time again to think about the future. This morning in #ghns on freenode we had a meeting about KNewStuff2 and ghns (Get Hot New Stuff) in general. There are a lot of cool things coming our way with Open Desktop (opendesktop.org) and it's use in Plasma (OCS Widget) and KNewStuff2. Before the meeting I wrote down a plan for making KNewStuff2 better prepared for these coming changes and documented it here: KNewStuff2Plan and will be working to achieve that end for KDE 4.4. Frederik will be working on the RESTProvider which will provide better access to the functionality on kde-look.org etc. sites. I'll be revamping a bunch of the KNewStuff2 library to make this easier and better also. Plus documenting my promise to do so here gives me more motivation/pressure to actually get it done =)

Want a taste of what's to come? How about the ability to rate/comment on a wallpaper from the KNewStuff2 dialog itself (something I promised back at the 4.0 release event but never got in ;) . How about the ability to see multiple pages of "latest uploaded" and "highest rated"? How about the ability to see all color schemes uploaded by that master color schemer Joe Colormakerman? I'm hoping we can get there and much further in the not so distant future. Anyone with me? =)

Utah Open Source Conference

2009-09-10T19:40:00.004-06:00

Hey everyone,

Time has come again for the third annual Utah Open Source Conference http://www.utosc.com (I missed the first two, but will be going to this one). I'll be bringing stuff to demo KDE to people and set up a booth there, so if anyone wants to come by and say hi, or see the coolness that is KDE, well, you know where I'll be anyway.

This is also a call for help. If anyone is going to be in the area and would like to help me represent KDE and man the booth that would be awesome. I've never actually run a booth like this before, so will be my first time, but should be fun I think.

Anyway, hope to see ya there, and let me know if you'd like to help with the booth either on irc (jpwhiting) or via e-mail (jpwhiting@kde.org).

The Future of Kttsd

2009-07-13T23:19:00.003-06:00

As you may or may not know, Kttsd is in the middle of some changes. Before Gary Cramblitt (aka phantomsdad) left the project, he made (and documented very well) a design to make kttsd basically just wrap speech-dispatcher. This design has many advantages, it simplifies kttsd code quite a bit, adds new functuonality, and makes kttsd better able to focus on what it does well, which I see as being the voice for KDE applications/desktop/platform. Kttsd has always been very good at filtering things like notifications (I use it to listen to irc and have for ages), and at providing an interface to an otherwise obscure sub-system (speech). However I also think there is definitely room for improvement =) And here's where you come in dear blog reader.

I'm considering changing up the ui a bit, to try to bring it into this century. The job list/control tab is somewhat dated, and it has always seemed a bit cumbersome to me. I'm considering making the job list more of a log of what has come in from what apps, with an easy to see view of what the filters did to the text for easy tweaking of filters (I seem to spend a bit of time each week trying to tweak the filters in one way or another). Other requests that have come on bugs.kde.org have been the ability to dynamically switch the current voice being used. So I'm thinking what if we make the jobs tab be more of a log and add a new tab for real-time speech control (change the current voice to male/female, language, pitch, speed, etc. all in realtime. Opinions anyone?

If we do the above we could also easily have a menu in kttsmgr's system tray icon to choose the voice, adjust speed/pitch, etc. on the fly also. So from you I'd like some feedback about which features you currently use in kttsd (talker chooser filter?, string replacer filter? easy (or not) access to festival/espeak/other speech system?) and what you'd like to see kttsd allow you to do in the future.

Thanks for reading and I hope next time to have some pretty pictures of a nice interface =)

KTTSD using speech-dispatcher

2009-06-12T08:31:00.004-06:00

Hey all, lately I've been working a bit on porting kttsd to use speech-dispatcher as per Gary Cramblitt (previous kttsd maintainer)'s design from back in 2005. Anyway, I thought I'd give a bit of a progress report on the effort here.

First a quick summary of Gary's design though. The idea is that speech-dispatcher will do most of the work previously done by kttsd (job management, synthesizer communication, etc.) which is simplifying kttsd's codebase quite a bit. The reason to switch to using speech-dispatcher is that it's a system app, so console apps can use it to synthesize text, kde apps (directly or via kttsd) can use it also, and it will do all job management, so apps wont be trying to talk at the same time, etc. Also gnome is switching to use speech-dispatcher exclusively for 3.0 release.

So status, I've got two machines both running speech-dispatcher 0.6.7 (configured with festival and espeak) and kttsd notifications are going there directly and working fine. There's still some work to do to get the job manager in kttsd to show all jobs from speech-dispatcher, and figure out how to represent all the voices speech-dispatcher has configured in the kttsd talker tab, but it is functional. I've got all the plugins for synthesizers removed from my branch, and took out the sentence boundary detector plugin also, as all that is done by speech-dispatcher. I'll be working closely soon with speech-dispatcher itself, adding some missing functionality to fill in the gaps of what kttsd used to be able to do and speech-dispatcher currently can't do yet (basic stuff like which job is currently being spoken, repeating jobs, etc.).

I've also removed the output methods (alsa and phonon) from the branch, as speech-dispatcher sends the output to the speakers itself. This avoids a bug we've had since 4.0 where when using phonon and the xine backend, speech got cut off quite often.

I hope to have kttsd using speech-dispatcher exclusively by 4.4 and have it provide a gui to set up speech-dispatcher also (besides prioritizing the available talkers that speech-dispatcher provides). My end goal is to have a setup where I can set apps like kopete and konversation to send new message notifications to kttsd, have it filter the notifications, and speak them. Obviously much more will be possible, but that's my itch anyway =)

P.S. if you want to try the branch, it's at https://svn.kde.org/home/kde/branches/work/kdeaccessibility-kttsd-using-speechd/kttsd

KNewStuff bug fixed (finally), and accessibility

2009-05-13T16:22:00.002-06:00

Talked to aseigo on irc this morning and was asked to fix a bug with kns. Previously there were two methods in the KNS::Engine class, downloadDialogModal() and downloadDialog(), the latter's documentation saying it's asynchronous and uses signals to tell the app of activity in the non-modal dialog. Since plasma's dialogs are all non-modal so it can update, etc. it needs kns to show a non-modal dialog for it's purposes. Easy fix, right? just send a signal saying what entries were changed when the dialog closes. Problem is KNS::Engine isn't a QObject (I can't remember why, but will remedy that with the next BIC fix), so a bit of tom-foolery was needed. I added a new downloadDialog(QObject * reciever, const char * slot); method that will connect the private object's signal to your slot for you. It's ugly, but it works for now. So now apps can actually use the non-modal version of the method to get new stuff, yay!

On another note I've been investigating the state of kde-accessibility lately, and have learned a lot with the help of some folks from gnome-accessibility, and other places. It seems we are a bit behind the curve, but can probably catch up easily. A couple things are on our list:
1. kttsd has a redesign that phantomsdad designed before he left that should simplify things a great deal by using speech-dispatcher rather than plugins for each synthesizer. This also has the effect that speech-dispatcher will be doing all the synthesizing, and all the output to the speakers as well, and may make kttsmgr a gui component to control parts of speechd (or at least speechd as kttsd interacts with it).
2. some gnome? devs are working on a bridge between AT-SPI and dbus, once this is done, existing Qt accessibility functionality should be usable right after Qt's x11 implementation is using the dbus from that bridge (I'm a bit unclear on this, but it sounds like it will work).
3. At this point I believe the only step to make Qt/KDE apps usable with the orca screen reader will be to turn on accessibility in qt QT-ACCESSIBILITY=1, and add accessible names and descriptions to widgets in our apps (and maybe in our kde libraries also? i.e. default name/description for kpushbutton)

I believe these steps will go a great deal towards making kde a more accessible desktop solution. (which incidentally makes us an option for government workers, etc. who are required to have accessible software from what I gather).

Anyone want any hot new stuff?

2009-01-31T13:40:00.004-07:00

Hi all,

In talking with Roger (DaSkreech) lately, we've been wondering what apps in KDE haven't been using KNewStuff to distribute data for their applications. KNewStuff is very well used in kde-edu apps, and in many of the kdegames for distributing game themes, levels, etc. It's also very well used in the desktop to distribute wallpapers, colorschemes, plasma themes, etc. I'd like to see it used more in apps like KRecipe, to get more recipe's, in any app that has support for scripting to distribute scripts, and so forth.

I am aware there are some missing features in KNewStuff, and woild like to know what developers have found when they've tried to use it. Any missing features that hindered it's use, or just lack of know-how of how to use it and set it up?

Some things I've been considering lately have been setting up a ghns provider at home to provide access to family pictures in wallpaper size, and making a windows port of khotnewstuff4 those family members stuck on windows could use to fetch the images. A bit over the top, but definitely possible. Many more ideas for ghns, and ODC (Open Desktop Collaboration) can be found in Frank's Keynote from last years akademy, a great presentation full of ideas for bringing our technology further along.

Anyway, if you have any ideas for how ghns could be used in more apps, or improvements for it, don't hesitate to leave comments here, or e-mail us on the ghns list ghns@lists.freedesktop.org or come join #ghns in irc.

I must be doing something wrong =)

2009-01-20T20:34:00.003-07:00

Hey all, I've been hanging out in irc and such lately, and am excited to get working on stuff again (poke me if you see me not working on stuff, I really need to get some things working better). Anyway, just wanted to throw something out there real fast and see if anyone else has hit it. For about the past year when I build qt-copy I've proceeded to move or delete the qt-copy/include/phonon folder in order for kdebase to not find those headers and find the installed ones from kdesupport/phonon. This last week I've been trying to not do that and build things straight as they come, but haven't had much luck, sort of. The other day I copied the .bashrc directly from techbase, and used it to build qt-copy, kdesupport, kdelibs, kdepimlibs, and kdebase without a hitch. Only problem was that it installed to $HOME/kde instead of /usr/local where I like it. So after that finished I tweaked the .bashrc to install to /usr/local and wouldn't you know it, kdebase/runtime/phonon/kcm didn't build again, same issue... That was a long story, but I'm just wondering if anyone out there that builds qt-copy and installs kde to /usr/local has it building somehow =)

In other news, there are a few things I need to work on (bugs in ghns mostly) and a few things I could work on and wanted to get some feedback about what people think would be most worthwhile. Just an informal leave a comment if you like one/a few of these ideas and let me know what you'd like to see.

1. KHotNewStuff updateable category - show all installed items that have updates, possibly with an update all button/action of some kind.

2. KHotNewStuff installed category - show all installed items so user can remove ones not wanted anymore, this makes the most sence for wallpapers, etc. that move off of the "Latest" list pretty quickly as new wallpapers come available.

3. KHotNewStuff upload - often asked for, some spamming issues to work out to make it work right, but should be doable, and would simplify distribution of data a great deal. (Think sharing guitar hero songs with your friends, only sharing with the world and not guitar hero songs, but kgoldrunner levels, etc. =)

4. KHotNewStuff ui tweaks - I'd like to add a hover for the preview that shows a larger image of the preview, fix up a lot of other things I left hanging when I left last summer, etc.

I'll probably be trying to work in all of the above, but just wonder what people would like to see first/most and if anyone has any ideas/feedback I'll welcome it all =)

wow, KMail

2008-11-11T10:47:00.002-07:00

Ivan already blogged about it, but I have to join in the festivities, KMail's new interface (using Qt4's model/view framework) totally rocks, it's so awesome and useful, and much faster than before (I use imap, so maybe that's part of it?) It's stuff like this that makes me want to get out there and code, code, code, and make kde totally rock as it already does, but even more so =) Good job guys.

Back, with lots of help and thanks

2008-11-07T15:19:00.002-07:00

Hello Planet,

I'm back, sort of. I've gotten a few good bug reports, and some thorough testing lately of KNewStuff which has helped poke me and get me back involved looking at code and trying to keep up with all that's going on. Thanks to the hard work of Petri Damstén of plasma comic fame, knewstuff will have less bugs for the 4.2 release.

I've also been taking a good look at ktts while I've been away from development, and it's in a decent but getting stale state. It's got a nice roadmap that Gary Cramblitt wrote before he had to leave the project is here: http://accessibility.kde.org/developer/kttsd/roadmap.html including the plan for moving to speech-dispatcher and working better with other desktop software. A lot has been done by him also, but there's still a lot to do, and a handful of bugs as well. Any devs with any spare time (spare time? what's that?) come join the mostly empty #kde-accessibility irc channel, and lend a bit of time =), even if just long enough to test kttsd with your app and some notifications and give bug reports =).

Holy crap, Akademy is going to totally Rock!

2008-07-03T08:54:00.003-06:00

Hi all,

Just took a look at the akademy schedule of presentations, and have to say, I'm floored. It's incredible how the community can get together, hold hands, and move forward like that. There are some incredible presentations I'll definitely be watching as soon as they are available. I can't believe the stuff talked about in Frank's Keynote description, absolutely incredible, can't wait until all that is available. As usual Inge is right when he will be presenting about how integration is our greatest asset. I hope Olaf's talk on accessibility opens some eyes to issues that are faced there too, should be great I think. Those are only a couple that jump out at me at first glance, the rest look very good also. Anyway, it's a great feeling to know we will be accomplishing these goals as we all press forward. A big thank you to the organizers, and all involved in this event, it's gonna totally rock!

Changes...

2008-06-20T09:56:00.003-06:00

Hi everyone,

Just wanted to let everyone know why I've been missing lately I guess. My life is changing, hopefully for the better, but it's going to be an adjustment at first for sure. Stephanie has decided that she does not love me anymore, and has fallen for someone she met on irc but not in person yet, who lives in India (yeah, it shocks everyone). We filed for divorce wednesday, I'm keeping custody of both our daughters, and stuff. I plan to keep contributing to KDE, but it will definitely be a lot less than before unfortunately because of time issues. I've lots of family and friends supporting us and we will be ok, I just need to take on both father and mother roles. I'll still be on irc lurking and stuff, but will probably be afk a lot more and stuff.

KNewStuff with Goya

2008-05-09T00:59:00.003-06:00

KHotNewstuff2 is going to be using Goya (once it moves out of kdereview and into kdeui on the 19th). So I thought publicly thank Raphael(ereslibre) and Kevin(ervin) for the great work on such a nice framework. I also wanted to let everyone see the new ui a bit and get some feedback.

This is 'khotnewstuff4 plasma-themes.knsrc' Currently the name, one line of description, author, and downloads are visible. I'll try to get rating shown, and a way to see more information about an entry. Also, notice the tooltip shows the complete description for each entry, it can be a bit big at times, not sure what the best way to show that would be, suggestions anyone?

Preparing for 4.1

2008-04-24T18:36:00.002-06:00

April flew by. I was able to speak with Josef on irc for a while a couple weeks ago, and got some direction for fixing some DXS (Desktop eXchange Service) issues. The engine for DXS is almost fully functional, but will take some more love these last couple weeks before freeze. Frank added id tags to the kde-look.org type sites so if all goes well we should be able to rate and do other collaboration-type things with stuff hosted there (There's an API, I just need to hook up to it now that entries have an id to send).

On the UI end, Ervin tells me he has one more api refactoring to do before Goya is ready for kdereview. I hope it's in time to be released for 4.1. It really is a nice thing to use, and has simplified much of knewstuff2's ui code.

Sharing some hindsight

2008-04-03T10:25:00.002-06:00

Right after thiago announced qt-copy had upgraded to rc1, I updated. Learn from my mistakes. Don't update without reverting everything (./apply-patches changes stuff, duh!). Also don't try to just make from your build folder, clean out your build folder first, and rerun configure.

Not sure why I was so braindead thismorning, but thought I'd share the wisdom of hindsight so you don't follow and make the same mistakes I did ;)

Color Scheme KHotNewStuff support

2008-03-26T03:25:00.003-06:00

The color schemes kcm module (under display in system-settings) got connected to KHotNewStuff2 last night (thanks again to Frank of kde-look.org). He also set up a reference of the existing providers so if your app has data on kde-*.org and you want to hook up KHotNewStuff, look for the provider url here.

Plasma themes via KHotNewStuff

2008-03-18T14:09:00.004-06:00

hi again, Anyone out there notice the "New Themes..." button in configure desktop dialog got enabled today? It allows easy access to all the many (7) plasma theme's early adopters have added to kde-look.org. I added the functionality (3 lines of code, and a providers url from Frank to add to the knsrc file) then used it to download all the themes.

Here's the mandatory screenshot:

A couple small problems so far. The so-called themes, aren't all really themes. Pink bunnies is really just a widget style, so needs a whole theme to make it work right (shouldn't be hard to do), and for some reason downloaded slim-glow and ozone don't appear in the drop-down, while Akoma, Aya, and TiComb do (maybe we only scan capital letter folders). Also, heron unpacks without a folder for itself, so maybe wait for the author of that one to repack it into a heron folder before trying that one.

Otherwise, enjoy!

P.S. the above screenshot was taken on my work pc which is not using goya, in case anyone was wondering.

goya, goya goya

2008-03-18T07:41:00.005-06:00

hello again, I've been playing with the next iteration of goya (I call it goya2, but Rafael probably has a better name). I also spoke with Celeste about a usability issue (system-wide install ui) which led to discussion about other usability issues in the KHotNewStuff download dialog (context-menu type actions in the drop down of the install button). I think the current plan is to separate the actions into three toolbuttons (Install/uninstall, info, and collaboration). We'll see if this makes sense or not in the ui.

I also got some artistic feedback from my current ui (not checked in) from Eugene and reacted to most of his suggestions in this screenshot.

Note that I'm using alternating row colors (white peach incidentally, is one of two in svn color schemes that actually has a different alternating row color), the black lines around the items have become the window color instead, and the install buttons are vertically aligned with the image previews on the left (which will have a frame and shadow soon).

Also note that since I'm setting a fixed width to the qtoolbuttons, goya doesn't render the whole button for some reason, Rafael will probably have a fix for this faster than I could write to tell him about it (he's been making leaps and bounds with goya lately).

Also note that if the summary of an item doesn't fit in the two lines I allow, the tooltip for that item will show the whole summary (in 4.0 the summary would often make the horizontal range of the items verrry long)

Anyway, suggestions, tips, questions?

Progress part 2

2008-03-07T06:43:00.003-07:00

I've mistakenly been waiting for Goya to move into kdereview and then kdelibs/kdeui so I could check in my ui changes to the kns download dialog (mistakenly, because I really could work on it more, rather than sit on my backside) (pokes Raphael). In the meantime I've been looking around for other small projects to fill my time. Unfortunately, Pino keeps finishing them before I even figure out what the problem is ;) (thanks Pino).

Anyway, long story short, I got back to looking at the download dialog more thismorning. I still have lots to do to get it working as well as it did in 4.0 (at least including the same information in the ui, with a bit nicer and faster interface). Also need to get some caching stuff figured out, and probably some categorization figured out also to make Kalzium's dataset not such a pain to view in the dialog. Also need to work on/test dxs client side code to make sure it works for what we'll need it for when plasma starts to use it (Get new widgets from the internet).

So small progress, but a good start, I got the dialog showing downloads (which really helps when you look at Most Downloads feed). And the provider information action working. Next I'd like to get the rating showing (maybe with those nice stars nepomuk uses?) and enable/connect rating items from the dialog itself. Then proceed to enable/connect all the actions in the Install button's menu to view comments, and such from the dialog.

P.S. got an update of Rubber Windows kwin plugin from level1 this morning. Works great, can't wait to hear Stephanie's reaction when she gets on the computer later and sees it. (Will check in as soon as I get word from level1 to do so)

progress (of others)

2008-03-06T18:38:00.002-07:00

Tonight has been eventful so far (and it's not over yet). I got home and asked pino about ktts konq plugin which I'd fixed the icon for earlier, then noticed it didn't work. He fixed it up quickly (thanks pino) and now we can speak web pages from konq again.

While pino was busy doing that, Conor "Level 1" Sullivan, sent me a cool wobble effect for kwin I tried out for him. Besides when it causes a crash, it works fine and is pretty cool. (WARNING: when used in conjunction with the shadow effect, you get wobbly windows with square shadows;)

Anyway, one of us will be looking into fixing the crash so the code can be checked in for all to enjoy.

Picross fans, I have not forgotten you

2008-02-15T17:09:00.003-07:00

Thismorning while waiting for my ride to work, I spent a couple minutes on kpicross making the create window show up so I could see it. It runs... sort of... anyway, shouldn't be hard to fix it and get it workable so we can all start creating our own picross puzzles for each other ;) Next step will be to hook up KHotNewStuff to it so we can share them :) Then make importing from png files maybe. Anyway, I think it'll be a fun little game for those that like puzzles. So don't despair, it will get some love soon.

Speaking of khotnewstuff, the downloaddialog is working a bit better and I'll be finishing up the goya stuff soon, so when that moves into kdeui (after the required two weeks in kdereview) we'll be ready to check in.

What is goya?

2008-02-07T11:02:00.000-07:00

The other day I mentioned goya in a posting, and liquidat replied that goya is not very known to users, and to explain what it is/does. Really, from a user's standpoint goya is just magic that makes it easy to put buttons, etc. into cells of a view. We get fast searching on lists/tables/trees, etc. by using Qt's Model/View framework, and now with goya we can easily put buttons, lineedits, and other interactive controls besides just text and icons.

1.1.3 firmware trick

2008-02-06T23:49:00.000-07:00

Just a quickie for anyone that upgrades their iphone or ipod-touch to 1.1.3 firmware using linux to put music on their jailbroken device. /var/root/Media is now /var/mobile/Media on the device. I must have spent the last couple hours writing and re-writing to the wrong place and wondering why it wouldn't find my music... Guess the ipod-convenience script needs to put the path in the config file now too ;-)

Progress

2008-02-06T09:32:00.000-07:00

Well, haven't given any progress reports lately, so here's what I've been up to (in case anyone cares).

KHotNewStuff's download dialog has a major overhaul on my desktop at home using ereslibre's goya library to draw buttons etc. It's much faster, just need to work out some details in the actions coming off the toolbuttons. I think I have an idea for how to handle caching and loading stuff from the internet concurrently (the current model doesn't work, because it falsely assumes reading the disk cache will always finish before loading a provider from the internet.)

In other news, I spent a bit of time playing with kttsd the other night (inserting debug statements, etc.) to try to track down a bug where the output is clipped. Turns out the phonon mediaobject was saying it was done a bit early, so kttsd deletes the job, etc. which causes it to clip. I've installed newer xine libs and will see if that fixes the problem. Until then you can set kttsd to use the alsa audio device and it works fine. I also found out how to get kttsd into the system settings when it's installed, and now speech notifications are persistent because kttsd is run on re-login again :) (time to remove those test notifications on window minimize, etc. before they drive my wife crazy ;-)

devs.clone();

2008-01-29T08:26:00.000-07:00

I've been testing more and more features of kde4 lately, and have noticed some things I'd like to fix if I had the time... I'm betting others have some of these also. I'd really like to fix up kttsd and get it working well again, as that is one of the things I miss from kde3 (listening to irc, etc.) It is somewhat working now, but could definitely use some love. Seems the maintainer ported it while kdelibs was in fluctuation, but there are still some things that look like they were written with Qt 3. Other kdeaccessibility apps could use some ui love also, simple things like finding out why &Language: can't be a buddy of a KLanguageButton in the kmouth setup window, etc.

I almost wonder if other devs have these side projects in their mind they'd like to work on also, if we should start pointing people to a page with junior jobs, or side projects we could help a newcomer figure out and maintain. There's a mentoring site here: http://www.kde.org/getinvolved/development/ that we could use, or something on techbase could be made possibly.

Anyway, I think we are doing great work, but we could use a few clones ;-)

Day 1, Building relationships and brainstorming

2008-01-17T21:53:00.000-07:00

Today was a long day, but a very good one.

This morning we had some good prep time. I sat at a table with Inge and Benjamin mostly, and updated/switched to the branch, to make sure all the Edu apps I'd like to quickly demo were in a usable state. I also got some presentation tips from Anne-Marie and Frederik on irc and from Inge in person. Tom helped me polish the presentation so it looks a bit better, and saw some Edu apps running on Benjamin's Mac.

There was an interesting Bof before lunch about Marketing, that had a lot of discussion back and forth about who we should target and how, and what the message should be. After lunch a bunch of people left to go on a tour of Google, and the rest of us worked in the relative quiet. I did a dry run of my presentation tomorrow to the 2 kde-user contest winners, Jason Harris, and some others that were curious. It went well, but I found some things to change for tomorrow.

Late afternoon there was a well-attended Bof but it was mostly Aaron explaining plasma ideas, which was pretty useful, but the bus schedule kept us from breaking out into some further discussion groups. It'll probably happen saturday though I bet.

The evening was very enjoyable. There was good food, good company, and lots of KDE talk going on. I met Peter from OSU and spoke with him a bit about the things going on there for Education, other open source software being developed there, etc. Spoke with two Amarok developers (Jeff and Leo), then found Edit(Frank) who runs kde-look.org and kde-apps.org, etc. Spoke with him for a while about knewstuff2, and some things we can do to make it work well with the new features (upload, rating, collaboration). I think we'll get something started tomorrow.

Anyway, I'm going to finally crash for the day, I'm sure you'll hear more tomorrow about the event itself, and all the presentations that are made there.

pre-release event first thoughts

2008-01-17T08:16:00.001-07:00

Hey, Tom (my brother) and I got here yesterday afternoon after a long 10 hour drive (taking turns so we didn't get too tired). We were greeted by a group of people I knew, but had never met before, Troy, Holger, Helio, Martijn, Jos, and Riccardo. We had a nice meal down the street _a few blocks_ where those from out of the country enjoyed our local steaks and burgers with a few more that showed up as we were leaving to eat.

The atmosphere is very excited as many are meeting people they've known on irc for a while for the first time (I'll never forget what Wade said when he met Danny for the first time :) and having a good time.

Momentum

2008-01-05T20:39:00.000-07:00

I know I'm a day or two late, but just a couple observations of the release tagging:

665 checkins the day before tagging, and though I only made 2 of those myself, I have to echo previous statements of a job well done. It was a bit crazy there at the end with lots of discussion about last minute fixes/check-ins, etc. but it's done now, and is what it is. Allen Winterz put it well the other day on irc when he said we did good and should be proud of ourselves. All is good, right? Wrong! now is the time to try to keep the momentum and realize the dream even more :) (As well as fix things that are still not complete of course)

Looking back for a moment, it's awesome to think about what has happened during the time leading up to this. I only joined the project May of last year, and even since then the project has grown by leaps and bounds (it probably grew much before then also, but I was not around to witness it) The first time I ran a kde 4 session back then, it often crashed, but was still fun to play with. Now a lot of us (hopefully all) are using it full-time which is awesome.

I spent part of today trying to fix a bug in the desktop containment, then spent some time with the family. When I came back to it, I noticed it was fixed. Alex Merry, (randomguy3) you rock!

Looking forward, for 4.1 I'd like to get KNS in better shape, get some small fixes into kanagram, help Frederik with keduvocdocument lib a bit, and hopefully get kpicross ready for full-time.

Lastly, I hope to meet anyone who will be at the release party/event in a couple weeks. I'll be there all three days probably.

Paris, KNS, other ramblings

2007-12-09T16:33:00.000-07:00

Paris was great! I know I've been home for almost a week now, but it's been a busy one, so now I have a chance to share the few things others didn't mention. (I almost blogged about paris a few times, but then read someone elses blog about it and realized they'd said everything I would have ;-).

Meeting everyone was awesome, working together in one room even more so. It was the first time I'd met anyone from KDE in person, and the community could definitely be felt, even among our small number of 14 edu people. Step was presented by Vladimir and was/is awesome. I hacked on kns mostly and plasma background slideshow mode a bit.

Back home now yesterday was able to get searching working in the kns download dialog, and today with Frederik's prodding and discussion we got kns useable for okular which has 3 providers right now and previously there was no way to choose which one you wanted to look at/download from. In order to do this and not make the ui completely confusing, we put all feeds from each provider together, so currently background wallpaper kns doesn't differentiate between Highest Rated, Most Downloads, and latest uploaded feeds, all 3 are put together and called kde-look.org. Maybe at some point we'll be able to ask for the whole lot of wallpapers and show them a page at a time or something...

I think next major thing to fix/make sure it's working is caching so you wont have to re-download all the entries descriptions that you downloaded last time already.

好久没有寫 (haven't written in a while)

2007-11-20T22:28:00.000-07:00

It's been a while, so I appologize in advance for the long post. I've tried to include screenshots to keep you interested ;-)
Edit: for some reason everytime I try to add an image to blogspot it replaces my whole post entry with the image tag. I'll post the images in another entry if you want to see what I describe.

We fixed KNewStuff2 a bit, enough so that it works ok for kanagram, khangman, klettres, etc. (I think it still needs some love, but it's functional at least). I guess this means I need to get kanagram l10n-kde4 translations of data files packaged and ready for kanagram to be able to download them. I should probably also convert the translated files to kvtml 1 format and pack them up for kde3 kanagram users to grab (had a request for the spanish ones already via e-mail).

Then I realized I hadn't tried kttsd in kde4 yet (I'm not blind yet, but use kttsd to listen to irc while working so I can chime in on any interesting conversations). Oliver Goffart (Gof) was able to get kttsd stuff into knotify right away when we noticed it was not going to quite work in the state it was in. It was ported to kde4 a number of times incrementally as kdelibs changed, but the last time was a while ago. Now it's functional, but has some audio issues (maybe Phonon related?)

Also noticed on the krush techbase page, someone mentioned an issue with kmouth, so I tried it and found something else interesting. In the startup wizard there's a page with a KLanguageButton and a QLabel "&Language", but for some reason when you try to set the languagebutton as the buddy of the label, Qt designer doesn't do it. Neither does QLabel::setBuddy(languageButton) work in code, not sure why this is, but most of the items in kde "Buttons" category in the designer don't work as buddies for some reason. Anyone with inside knowledge or that wants to figure this bug/issue out is welcome to it. I couldn't find any attribute on klanguage button or any others that might be the culprit, but I only looked for a bit.

Then moved on to look at all the great things going on in Plasma. Kudos to all those that built such a nice framework, and it's only going to get better from what I hear. I tried to fix some xinerama issues in it last week, but didn't get too far, was able to get background image configuring ui into place (though the static image one is temporary until Ruphy gets api for packages done, etc.)

Tonight Mwoehlke came back around and was able to fill in some of the effects slots in the colors kcm code, and explain what needed doing for the rest. It's functional now, but still needs some minor fixes like loading and saving of effects with the color scheme files, etc. I think now that that's working some of us (especially myself) can finally understand what kcolorscheme actually can do. Oh and apply color scheme to non kde4 apps should work now also.

Playing with kde4 is so much more enjoyable thanks to all the great work put in recently on krush days and bug fixing in general. This really is an exciting time for us to all band together and fix bugs in preparation for release.

Busy week and day

2007-11-02T22:55:00.025-06:00

Well, this week flew by. I always had something interesting to work on at work, and it changed throughout the week which is nice. Today was good also, because while at work kde4-krushing got started and kanagram came up so I got a few bugs to fix. I love bug-hunting/fixing sessions because I get to see direct interaction in the community on a larger scale than normal. It just amazes me how we can all work together and help each other to make our hopes a reality. Anyway, hopefully this weekend will proceed to be nice and allow us some nice krushing (I should get some hacking time as Stephanie has to work saturday and sunday).

Colors, Colors, and more Colors

2007-10-11T05:52:00.001-06:00

Well, last evening I checked in a small change to the colors kcm, that will allow you to save color schemes. Small change in that it wasn't much code, big change though in that we are probably going to want some default system color schemes by release time. I committed one scheme so far, BeOS, not because I like it, it was just easy. Actually making color schemes isn't too hard at all, I just don't trust myself to make decent ones, and with good reason.

When I mentioned to coworkers that I'm working on the colors dialog for kde 4, some laughed, others thought I was joking or thought they should report me to those in charge. I've become notorious at work for having bad color schemes. I usually choose a scheme that's very dark with light text (green on black anyone?). This usually has issues on any platform, but so far the new stuff in KColorScheme seems to be a viable solution for the issues I've hit in kde3, windows, etc...

Anyway, on to the fun stuff. If you want to make a color scheme, just fire up the latest 'kcmshell colors'. You can choose most colors from the initial table (Common Colors), but you can fine tune colors in their respective tables also by choosing View, Window, Button, or Selection from the combobox. Once you have a scheme you like (or that is in line with your style, Oxygen palette, etc.) just hit save and a color scheme file will be generated in your .kde4/share/apps/color-schemes/ folder.

I've also set up CMakeLists.txt to copy anything that is placed in the kdebase/workspace/kcontrol/colors/schemes/ folder into share/apps/color-schemes as a system scheme, so simply move your schemes there when/if you want to make it ship with kde4.

P.S. if BeOS isn't a scheme we want to ship with kde4 release, feel free to take it out, I just put it there as an example, and so the list isn't completely empty for now until we get some more.

P.P.S. also note that the effects page is not functional yet, and changes there are not saved/loaded in schemes yet. Also Tooltip colors are not actually used by kde apps yet, but feel free to change the colors, as they will work when they are fixed ;-)

Surviving BIC monday, etc.

2007-09-24T17:09:00.000-06:00

Well, BIC monday was tricky, but we survived it thanks to lots of cooperation in #kde4-devel, good work everyone. Work was hectic as most mondays when the boss just got back from a business trip are, but somehow I was also able to get mbrola going on my machine (Yes, I'm one of those weird people that hooks konversation and kopete up to kttsd so I can hear messages on my headphones.)

I was also thinking yesterday, that maybe some of you might skip over my posts because of lack of picture, so I included a picture of kpicross scaled with white-on-grey kde4 color scheme made possible by the new colors kcm (sorry, that was a blatant boast, but probably not a good one, as white on grey is horrid).

Colors, Picross, and Comminuty

2007-09-22T21:58:00.000-06:00

Hey, it's been a while since I've posted. (insert standard excuse here) Some good things have happened since last time though. I somehow got involved with the colors kcm helping mwoelke with that a bit. It moved into trunk this week, and is somewhat functional, you can set your colors and apply/ok work, but saving/loading color schemes is not in place yet, and the effects page does nothing yet. Also an issue has been discovered in kwin when using the colors kcm or the composite kcm with composite turned on, it hangs on apply in both unless rivo or Seli got that fixed already.

In other news, in my daily reading on planet.kde.org I read that kdenonbeta stuff is to be moved soon, so I checked out what was in there, and found KPicross, a picross game Zack made on a plane trip years ago. I just got back into picross with Picross DS and would like to see kpicross come back to life. So I asked Zack about it, and moved it into playground. I spent some time on it today, and got it ported to Qt 4 and KDE 4 and got it scaling and using KColorScheme colors for drawing. It's still got a lot of work to make it beautiful like the rest of kdegames, but I just keep imagining sharing picross puzzles with other kde-ers through KHotNewStuff and it keeps me motivated.

Back in kde-edu stuff, Frederik has somehow kept his pace up with fixes to Parley. Some Chinese contributors have donated some chinese vocabulary files that I think I'll be utilizing soon to review chinese characters with as my understanding in #kde-cn is not what it should be.

Anyway, enough rambling, my goals for this weekend are to have colors kcm functional to the point that the only thing missing is saving/loading of scheme files.

Watching Frederik go

2007-09-01T00:21:00.000-06:00

This week I haven't done much, but it seems like lots has happened. Probably because the checkins in keduvocdocument were many and a lot changed. Thanks to Frederik for taking on the ugly conjugation class, and for making an identifiers class, as well as fixing kvoctrain issues that the changes in the library caused (Sorry about that fregl.)

Not sure if anyone cares, but in the kde diplomacy game on phpdiplomacy.net we are down to the final 4 players, and it seems sides have been taken. Groundferret (Germany) and I (France) have made war with SaroEngels (Turkey) and his brother haldir (Austria).

On the kde4 testing front (informally only for now) CPgmrSw2 (sorry, I butchered your nick) noticed about a month ago that shortcut keys were not working in kde 4 for some reason. We looked into it a bit at the time, but couldn't find any solution (or what the problem was for that matter.) This last week Seli got back from vacation, and when we mentioned it to him Mattias Kretz said his were working fine. Then we found his was working ok when launched from kde3, so we tried various combinations of kde3 and kde4 sessions with kde4's kwin window manager. Mikmak of yzis fame found the problem had to do with KGlobalAccel's going away when kded encountered problems. I found a way to get it working on my system by pointing kde4.dekstop at a small shell script that sets up my environment with kde4 paths, and then executing kde4's startkde. (I can finally Ctrl-F8 to get the desktop grid-effect, and alt-tab with composite, yay!) Mikmak also had success by removing old plugins from his KDE4/libs folder.

Can't think of anything else for this week, but I'll probably think of something this weekend (and hopefully get some hacking done also to report about.)

P.S. thanks to all those that responded to either my last post or annma's e-mail and helped translate/update khangman/kanagram data files. It's great to be part of a community so willing to help each other out.

Share and share alike

2007-08-27T23:11:00.000-06:00

Well, I just finally made my last commit to KHangman to make it use the same folder for its kvtml files as KAnagram. It's been a long time coming, but I think it was well worth the effort. Now both KHangman and Kanagram have access to each other's translated data files (ping me on irc if you speak another language and would be willing to do other translations ;-). And also have access to any files downloaded through KHotNewStuff from either application. Kanagram benefited because KHangman has quite a few translations of its files done, and KHangman benefitted because KAnagram has 17 files in each language that has been translated (except Chinese which has only 14 so far, but they are huge!). All of both applications data files have also been converted to the new kvtml 2 xml format that is actually human readable, thanks to the changes in the library, and Frederik Gladhorn and Peter Hedlunds great design. Last week also saw much improvement in libkeduvocdocument by Frederik making things understandable, etc. cleaning out old code and fixing things to be more flexible (you can rename the verb-type now if you like!)

My computer is back up to snuff running Feisty again and it's great to be back. Last week was one of lost KDE productivity with the backup, re-install, restore, checkout, rebuild... But it was nice to do a build from scratch again installing libs as necessary.

On the Kompromise front, kleag, the KSirk maintainer has contacted us in #kde-diplomacy about some possible sharing of network code, and map drawing code, which will be a great benefit I think.

computer issues, Danes, and diplomacy

2007-08-24T23:48:00.000-06:00

Well, this week Ann-Marie came back! We had lots of stuff for her when she got here, and she hopefully will have a bit more hacking time tomorrow sounds like. She also got to meet all the new folks that have been hanging out in #kde-edu since she left (groundferret, SaroEngels, timlinux, etc.) Interestingly, since she's been back more females have been in that channel than the whole time she was gone (kdeb, hannascott, etc.)

I've been debating downgrading back from gutsy (beta ubuntu) to feisty (latest ubuntu) all week, and finally made the decision when I couldn't get nvidia X drivers working anymore in gutsy. Backed up all my personal code, pictures, music, videos, etc. to the my local web-server and re-installed feisty. It's nice to have a clean new install to play with again, even though I know I'll do something to ruin it soon enough... :)

Thursday saw more Danish people on irc than I'd noticed previously. Terrax (hope I remebered your nick right) seems enthusiastic about helping with translation, but apparently Danish translation is/has been a one-man job lately (no mailinglist or website) but Kris Thomsen who translated kanagram's data files into Danish for us also has interest in translation, so maybe it's the beginnings of a translation team.

Lastly a couple weeks ago groundferret got a few of us started on Diplomacy which is a risk-esque strategy game set in Europe. You can see the game here. It's a pretty fun and interesting game, and has prompted the beginning of KDiplomacy a new kdegames project to make a networked diplomacy game for KDE.

Anyway, as for progress, what with my computer issues I haven't done much kdeedu stuff this week. I plan to remedy that by finishing the conversion of khangman data files to kvtml 2 format, and modifying them to have the words hints in the comment tag instead of the first translation tag. Hopefully I can fix the crash I introduced to khangman also... :)

Anyway, hopefully the weekend will make up for a less-productive kde week ;-)

A kde-free weekend (almost)

2007-08-19T20:56:00.000-06:00

I had planned to finish keduvocdocument lesson class last weekend, so I finally got it to build this weekend of course. Then the rest of the weekend was spent relaxing (took my brother to a movie for his birthday that was last week, got into a couple new video games, etc. Almost was a kde-free weekend, but then thismorning when I woke up I got a hold of Frederick, and checked in the lesson class for his consumption in kvoctrain (nobody else that uses kvtml uses lessons yet.) Anyway, it's been nice to relax for a bit, and will be easy to get back into the swing of work and kde tomorrow again.

hacking and real life(tm)

2007-08-15T21:39:00.000-06:00

Had a great weekend with lots of collaboration, discussion, and hacking in kde-edu saturday and sunday. Kvtml version 2 is now what all apps that use it write with. There's a method to get around the KNS inability to put stuff in sub-folders. A sorting method to put files into sub-folders by locale.

We the folks of #kde-edu decided we want to get kde-edu.org completed by the kde 4 release since it is geared towards students and teachers, wherease edu.kde.org is geared towards developers of educational software. With lots of links to the simpler site from the dev site. Danny is working the design a bit, then we need to fill it with content on each app.

A bit of Real Life (tm) hit monday evening, so not much was done kde-wise. I did get nvidia drivers working in gutsy finally yesterday though, by using the older kernel, so now kwin is much faster again.

Anyway, hopefully this weekend keduvocdocument will get a lesson class for kvoctrain to use later, and kanagram's kvtml editor will get some polish. Then I'd like to play with some plasmoids to learn plasma and get going on Danny's svn world view plasmoid.

P.S. I got khangman using kvtml 2 files from the shared location, but it's a bit weird. Annma if you read this, I hope you'll be back by the planned feature freeze August 26th, so I can ask you a few questions. :)

Intro for Planet, and status

2007-08-06T22:14:00.000-06:00

Hello everyone,

Chris Lee added me to planet.kde.org today, so I thought I'd introduce myself to those that may not know me (I'm pretty well known by now in #kde-edu.) I'm Jeremy Whiting, and I've been working for Scientific Toolworks, Inc. for over a year and a half now. When I started the company had decided to use Qt as its cross-platform toolkit. Anyway, long story short, a I learned Qt from work, and a few months ago started asking where I could help with the kde4 porting efforts on irc. I submitted a couple patches, then made kanagram use svg to scale itself. I soon thereafter became kanagram's maintainer, and have added support for kvtml 2 files to libkdeedu with Frederik Gladhorn's guidance and suggestions.

For those that do know me, I've been spending the past couple days planning out my todo list for the release, besides getting chinese kvtml files for kanagram/khangman/kvoctrain/kwordquiz to share from new friends in #kde-cn. I'd like to get khangman using the shared "share/apps/kvtml/locale" kvtml files by the time annma gets back soon. And I hope after that to be able to get a helper method in keduvocdocument to sort files downloaded from KNewStuff to their appropriate locale sub-folder.

When Pete get's back and gets playground/edu/habitat app and room classes working, I'll finish the component class and start making the basic components. I'll also be working on a plasmoid for Danny that shows the svn checkins by region using his developer region data, and the marble with a plain map. These will both be in playground for a while, but will be exciting to bring to fruition.

P.S. It's been great so far to get to know the few kde devs I've met in irc so far and to be apart of this great community.

Germans and Chinese

2007-08-01T22:32:00.001-06:00

Weird topic, but that's the people I've been meeting lately on IRC. Last week I kept introducing myself to people on kde-edu and kde-windows. Each one I'd ask where they are from and look on marble to see where they live. Every person I talked to that day lived in Germany. Since I've been trying to get people to translate Kanagram data files for the last while, I asked them to do German translations for us, and Saro Engels did the translation for us.

Then a couple days ago I met another (part?) German living in California that has a liking for British spelling, so he "translated" Kanagram and Khangman data files into en_GB for us. I think he has the record so far for fast translation, he did all 17 Kanagram files, and 3 KHangMan files in about 2 hours :)

Finally, last evening, I discovered #kde-cn when I did a channel search for kde on freenode. So I got on and practiced my degraded Chinese and learned a couple simplified characters in the process. Having learned traditional Chinese characters and trying to read simplified characters is a bit like learning how to read cursive first, then trying to read block print. Anyway, I met some friendly kde-enthusiasts there, asked them about how to make Kanagram useful to them, since chinese words are only one or two characters long. I had the idea that we could make a data file of idioms to unscramble, as most of those are whole sentences, or at least 4 characters in shortened form. They had the brilliant idea of using well-known ancient Chinese literature like lines from Tang Poems to unscramble. One high-school student volunteered to take some and make data files for me, since he knows xml a bit. Thus the first chinese kvtml file was checked in to kde svn thismorning :) I put it into zh_CN and zh_HK since both use simplified Chinese characters. I think I'll fire up the simplified to traditional perl script I have and make traditional files for zh_TW also soon.

Anyway, in other news I'm about done with the kvtml 2 support library, and have been focusing on converting kvtml files to the new format and fixing issues in Kanagram. I also planned out the architecture of Habitat today with Danny and Pete. Pete is going to do the room class(es) and I'll do the Component class(es) since I need to learn plasma data engines anyway for Danny's svn commit location plasmoid and to one day make a small anagram plasmoid out of kanagram's game class.

More boring progress

2007-07-25T05:03:00.001-06:00

My wife read my blog the other day. Needless to say, she thinks I'm more dull than she did before ;)

Anyway, yesterday was a state holiday to celebrate pioneers that first came to Utah http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pioneer_Day_(Utah) . So I got the day off of work and spent the day at home (not really anything pioneer related at home, but it was hot outside). I spent most of the morning doing some more work in kdeeducore library on kvtml 2. The rest of the day was spent playing video games, and watching a movie with my brother.

As far as kvtml 2 goes, now the reader is almost done, except for a couple crucial parts I'd like to ask Frederik about before I proceed, and the writer has progressed to the point that I can convert old format kanagram and khangman files to the new format. I've realized that kanagram has been missing me lately, as my todo is getting longer instead of shorter there. Well that's enough rambling for one post I think.

Kvtml Progress

2007-07-21T00:21:00.001-06:00

Well, another couple weeks have passed, but hopefully this will be more frequent as I am doing more now and thus have more to write about.

First of all, thanks to Frederik Gladhorn and Peter Hedlund, we have a good design for the next version of xml to store vocabularies in (kvtml version 2). I've spent a good part of my evenings this week working on the reader for it, and only have a couple hangups so far that I'll need to ask help understanding what they are supposed to do. I hope to start the reader tomorrow and get it to the point that it can write the basic tags that are in kanagram and khangman's data files (information, entries, and identifiers). When I get that far I'll make a small test app that reads kvtml files, and writes kvtml v2 files for testing, and for scripting the conversion of all of kanagram's data files to the new format. Yes, the old format is still supported, but writing will hopefully all be done using the new format, assuming all goes well with the writer ;)

In other news, I think I met 5 or 6 kde people from Germany this week. I even was able to convince one "Saro Engels" to translate kanagram's data files into german for us. I also added credits to the translators I know about in kanagram's about info (Pino Toscano for Italian, Kris Thomsen for Danish, and now Saro for German.) If anyone knows who did the ca, es, or gl translations, please let me know (As if anyone reads my blog anyway...)

Until next time...

Week Off

2007-07-02T20:35:00.000-06:00

It's been too long since I posted, but now I have a week of vacation starting tomorrow with my birthday. Yay. But seriously, I always tell people to congratulate my mom, since I didn't have to do much to be born. :)

Anyway, I plan to spend the week with my daughters, wife, and mornings with kde if possible. Who am I kidding, I can't sleep in even if I try, so I might as well make use of the time. Hopefully I can work out a couple more bugs/tweaks to kanagram, and get kvtml2reader writer going. If I get that far, I'd also like to design a kvtml editor for libkdeedu that all of us can use (khangman, kanagram, kwordquiz, etc.) from within our apps. My main motivation for doing this is that kanagram's vocabulary editor is very lacking in features currently.

I think once all that's done I need to hunker down and either get some stuff done in CPrgmSwr2's kollagame, or look into what it would take to get chinese into kiten. There, now that I've posted it I actually have to remember/do them. :D

Introduction

2007-06-04T21:36:00.000-06:00

Hello all.

First a brief introduction is probably in order. I'm a twenty-something software engineer at a small software company in Saint George, Utah. I am married and have two daughters. I also just graduated from Dixie State College.

Anyway, the main reason I'm writing this blog is to share experiences I have with KDE development. I'm just getting started with it, but allready I've met so many people threugh this, that I can't believe I didn't start much earlier.

First how it happened. I was looking for a way to contribute back to the opensource community that I've appreciated ever since I installed linux for the first time in high school over 10 years ago. We use Qt 4 at work for cross-platform development, so I've been using qt for a year and a half. I also noticed that kde4 was being worked on which is porting kde from qt3 to qt4. I started hanging out on kde4-devel irc channel and asking questions about anyone wanting help. I was told many times, to just build kde trunk and start fixing things, so I did.

With the help of dfaure and annma, I submitted a couple patches to ktimer and one to konsole (small fixes, but educational nonetheless.) At that point I started looking at ui work since I was doing some ui work at work also. I ran into annma on irc and she gave me one of her tasks to make kanagram scale visually with svg graphics. I got that started and working in about a week and got an svn account out of the ordeal. (And later became maintainer of kanagram)

Wow that turned out to be longer than I expected, I'll write more tomorrow to finish the story.